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our annual trip this year will be from June 12-17, with visits to various organizations in London, Paris, Munich and Milan. We plan to continue to include Women in IP Law events and to meet with AIPPI chapters in each city as well.

If you are insterested in being considered as delegate, please send Dewayne and me an email by Monday, February 29, 2016.

Under AIPLA guidelines, we are limited to 25 delegates per city and every US-based delegate is required to participate the entire weem and to attend all meetings. delegates based in Europe are welcome to join for a portion of the trip.

In your reply email, please provide any speaking topic suggestions, and let us know if you are interested in speaking on a prticular topic. Also, please include any European IP topics that you would like to learn more about.

A follow-up letter to the EPO concerning Unitary Patent fees has been submitted by AIPLA with support from our committee. Our previous letter of Feb. 11 can be found by clicking here.

After we submitted the previous letter, the President of the EPO proposed two alternative methods of computing UP fees, both of which were higher than our recommendations (see attached UP fee proposal). EPO has informed us that we can provide revised comments in response to the President’s proposal, but that they should be submitted by Thursday of this week in order to be considered at a critical EPO meeting to be held early next week. This is a critical issue for users of the European patent system, hence the urgency to be able to respond in good time.

In our previous letter, we supported a TOP3 calculation (fees set at the current cost of designating the top 3 countries in Europe, namely Germany, UK and France). The President’s alternative proposals are (i) TOP4, or (ii) TOP5 with an SME fee reduction. Both alternatives use Netherlands (NL) as the fourth office, which raises the overall fees significantly because Netherlands is currently very expensive.

In the draft follow-up letter, we continue to urge the TOP3 level for fees. However, if that is deemed totally impossible, we suggest adopting renewal fees at a level lower than the proposed TOP4 with NL; this would mean TOP4 without using the Netherlands as the only 4th state for the purposes of calculation.

With respect to SME fee reductions, the draft states that we oppose any significant increase in the fees charged to other users in order to fund SME fee reductions. Instead, we suggest that they should be funded using the share of renewal fees received by the Member State patent offices.

The letter is stored under our committee documents/UP_fees folder. A public version may be foundclicking here.

Please feel free to share them with others.

We want to thank John Hornickel, John Pegram and Al Tramposch for their efforts.

One of the major concerns regarding the proposed EU Unitary Patent has been the cost, especially the renewal fees. We understand that EPO management is to make a recommendation to the UP Select Committee in February and that the Select Committee expects to publish a draft fee schedule in March.

The EPO invited six user organizations to each have a consultation with them in early 2015 regarding the fees. They included the official observers (European Patent Institute and Business Europe), two U.S. associations (AIPLA and IPO), and two Japanese organizations (Japan Intellectual Property Association and Japan Patent Attorney Association).

AIPLA held its consultation with Dr. Froehlinger and others by video conference on February 4th, having requested additional time and information from the EPO for preparation. The AIPLA participants were its President, Sharon Israel (Mayer Brown); two Board members: (John Hornickel (Polyone Corp.) and Kevin Rhodes (3M)), a Co-Chair and member of the IP Practice in Europe Committee (Iris Mok (Intel) and John Pegram (Fish & Richardson), respectively); and Deputy Executive Director, Albert Tramposch.

AIPLA sent its follow-up letter to Dr. Froehlinger at the EPO yesterday. Click here to view our documents page.

We have uploaded presentations and papers from the annual meeting in the committee documents/Annual meeting 2014 folder under the link below. Thanks to all of you who have contributed to the committee success in the annual meeting. Please also join me in thanking Laura for her leadership in the past 2 years and congratulating Martin Koehler on his new leadership role as co-chair of this committee in the next 2 years.

Our committee will host 2 sessions during the annual meeting on Oct 24. A morning plenary session will focus on UPC litigationwith first hand information from Margot Fröhlinger, a key EPO person for the UPC project, and committee members from Rules and Procedures Drafting for the UPC. In this session, we will cover main EU patent litigation countries including Germany, Netherlands, France and UK.

An afternoon committee session will focus on impact of UPC on licensing and FRAND. In addition, the EPO President will be keynote speaker. We encourage you to attend and please see below link for more information. Looking forward to seeing you there!

We have completed our annual trip last week with great success. Thank you very much to those of you who contributed to the planning and participation of the trip. We have posted presentations from the trip HERE. Thanks again for your help and we look forward to next year's trip.

We will have a booth highlighting our activities in the Committee Expo. If you are interested in attending the event, please register here by Jan 6 to receive a discount and feel free to stop by our booth or our committee meeting after the Expo.

4.Committee Page

We have updated our IP Practice in Europe Committee page. You will find information about the committee announcements, calendar, annual trips, meeting minutes and committee reports. This is a great way to stay connected to our committee.

We look forward to your participation in 2014, and please feel free to contact us if you have any question or comments.